Compound Climate Exposures and Public Health: A Synthesis of Research and Future Directions

Compound climate events involve the intersection of individual climate events that are linked through space, time, or both. Anthropogenic climate change will likely increase the burden of these compound events, which often have synergistic health effects, meaning that the combined effect exceeds the sum of their individual parts. These include multivariate (co-occurring) events such as extreme heat and wildfires as well as temporally compounding (sequential) events such as debris flows after wildfire events. Existing epidemiological evidence has mostly identified synergistic health effects, primarily associated with multivariate compound climate exposures at short timescales. The research, however, is often limited by a lack of information on explicit exposure pathways that link changes in climate to health outcomes and inequalities. We discuss opportunities for public health interventions and methodological considerations for future studies in a compound climate and health framework.